Word: influenza
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...knew that she had another specimen in her lab, taken from a 13-year-old girl admitted to Prince of Wales Hospital so sick that she had been placed on a respirator. The hospital had identified the underlying virus as Influenza A but wanted Lim to determine the subtype. Lim asked her lab technicians to come in early the next morning, Saturday, Dec. 6, to test specimens from the two patients. Both again reacted to the H5 reagents...
...tier of a quiet but elaborate global surveillance network that tracks changes in the world's flu viruses. Almost as an afterthought, Lim sent a sample to Jan De Jong, a virologist at the Dutch National Institute of Health and the Environment who liked to collect unusual strains of influenza. She had never met De Jong, but over the years they had developed a rapport...
...short order, more cases began turning up throughout Hong Kong. On Dec. 4, a 24-year-old woman developed a fever, sore throat and cough, and complained of dizziness. Five days later, she was in the intensive-care unit on a respirator with a confirmed case of H5 influenza. On Dec. 7, a five year-old girl began vomiting and developed other flu symptoms. H5 again. On Dec. 12, another child, a cousin of the five-year-old, came down with a fever and was hospitalized with H5. And a new outbreak of H5 had turned up on a fourth...
While the outbreak highlighted the success of the surveillance network, it also showed how dangerously mutable influenza viruses can be and that, in their most sinister forms, they can be as deadly as any other disease known to man, more akin to Ebola than to the fevers and aches most people associate with flu. Virologists say the decision to kill all the chickens in Hong Kong--widely derided at the time--was in fact the smartest thing that could be done and that it might have prevented a more widespread disaster. "The question is," says Robert Webster, chairman...
Rumors flew of strange influenza-like diseases affecting animals, even moose, according to the pandemic's chronicler, Alfred W. Crosby Jr. One rumor turned out to be true--disturbingly so for anyone familiar with the subsequent history of influenza research and the recent Hong Kong outbreak. Farmers in 1918 discovered that something was making their pigs very sick, with high fevers and bad coughs. No such pig flu had ever been noticed before 1918, but every fall thereafter an influenza-like illness attacked the nation's hog population. In 1928 a researcher from the Rockefeller Institute, Richard E. Shope, went...